New Johnny Cash-Based LP, ‘Forever Words,’ Features Chris Cornell

The late Chris Cornell is one of more than a dozen artists who've contributed to a new album of songs based on previously unpublished poems and other writings by Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash: Forever Words includes a wide range of artists -- from contemporaries and cohorts like Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson to more recent artists like Kacey Musgraves and Robert Glasper -- building new songs around poems and other words left behind by Cash after he died in 2003.

Cornell, who died last year, contributes a song called "You Never Knew My Mind" to the project, which will be released on April 6. It was one of the last recordings he made. You can see a trailer above and the album's track listing, plus contributing artists, below.

Cash recorded Cornell's Soundgarden song "Rusty Cage" on his 1995 album Unchained, the second of his stripped-down and career-reviving "American Recordings" LPs made with producer Rick Rubin.

Johnny Cash: Forever Words is co-produced by Cash's son John Carter Cash, who notes in a press release that he discovered a "monstrous amassment” of lyrics, poems, handwritten letters and more after his father died. Many of the works were first published in the book Forever Words: The Unknown Poems, which served as inspiration for the 16 tracks found on the album.

"Determining the artist for each song was truly a matter of the heart," said John Carter Cash. "I picked the artists who are most connected with my father, who had a personal story that was connected with Dad. It became an exciting endeavor to go through these works, to put them together and present them to different people who could finish them in a way that I believed that Dad would have wanted."